It's Flat! Using Wowhead Maps

"Ka-kaw!" The parrot spoke in a language I could not understand. Had I a cracker, I might try to coax the rainbow-colored Polly into guiding me to the nearest encampment...but empty-handed, I was forced to go it alone – all alone in the deep, damp jungle. The night was quickly approaching as the sun sat midway on the horizon. Unlike some of my unfortunate companions, I was smart enough to have brought my own set of charts and maps...but I suddenly realized that without proper knowledge I may as well not even possess them.

Insert Wowhead. We have a wonderful tool here aptly named Wowhead Maps. In this blog entry I will introduce the mapping system and show how to use it to explore, pinpoint, and share destinations with others. Stick around, it's definitely going to be a mappy New Year!

In this harsh cosmos, one must learn to travel properly to keep from getting lost. What better way to travel than with a map? In the following steps I'll outline how to use the map tool so you can get the most out of it. We will use the Hogger quest line for our example.

Click on the first box for the Eastern Kingdoms and select Elwynn Forest.

Move your mouse over the map and notice in the lower, left-hand corner are some x and y coordinates.

Find 25.0, 78.0 and click on the map. A 'pin' should be made on the map. The pin should be located at the intersection west of the river which runs through Forest's Edge. At this location is a wanted poster which gives the quest Wanted: Hogger.

Next, we need to find the notorious gnoll named Hogger. Pin 26.0, 90.0 on the map and begin your search in-game.

Phew! That was tough. Now to complete the quest you'll need to find Marshal Dughan. He is located at 42.0, 66.0 -- pin it on the map!

To remove a pin, simply click it second time. In order to share these maps with others, click the text 'Link to this map' at the bottom. Next, copy the URL from your Internet browser's address bar.

Using the Maps tool, and the Wowhead Looter mod, one is able to easily track coordinates in-game without a lot of bloat like some other add-ons. Type /wl maploc to toggle the use of coordinates on the world map with our add-on. For more information about the Wowhead Looter add-on and how you may help contribute dataz while exploring, click here.

So our question to you is: have you used the map system before? What did you use it for?

Comments

Comment by Bobthe0rc

Hehe, I've used maps before on pages to find things, but I didn't know you could make your own like that! I'll have to try it :D

Comment by Tourlip

on 2009-01-06T02:35:15-06:00

Maps are very useful for pointing out the locations of quest objectives. I wish Wowhead had a button at a quest page to open map for all four needed npcs (or npcs that drop the needed item).

Comment by meanball

on 2009-01-06T03:12:30-06:00

i always us other people's maps(hahaha!).

Comment by 0xdeadc0de

on 2009-01-06T03:19:29-06:00

There's one thing that Wowhead lacks on it's map tool and I have to do it by hand in paint when needed.

It will be really nice if we can use numbers for pins to trace a route. For example the above finished map lacks the information what stands near each pin. And if you want to make a guide or mark a path for a friend you have to :

Comment by Tourlip

Comment by neura

Yup, some forum threads have had the dubious pleasure of seeing some of my Wowhead marked maps for things like routes.

Would be nice to have a link to the map page from the zone info though. You can get to the zone info quickly from a quest or whatnot usually, but then there's no link to the interactive map.

Comment by leth

on 2009-01-06T03:50:26-06:00

I think the most useful application for me has been to use maps to display relevant locations for quests, for example to display these three quest objective mobs on the same map, so that I don't have to go to the page of each one to find out where they are, or read comments and try to piece together their locations in my head.

I think the community would greatly benefit from having map entries for quests like that, to show where relevant things occur, in the same way that strategies for bosses are included on their pages.

Comment by Dextren

on 2009-01-06T08:55:03-06:00

That is an amazing tool. I used it once when I made this to try and help people understand where Marshal Windsor goes in his Jail Break!. Too bad Blizz had to remove this wonderful quest line. :(

Comment by Mondryn

on 2009-01-06T09:00:57-06:00

It will be really nice if we can use numbers for pins to trace a route. For example the above finished map lacks the information what stands near each pin.

To take this one step further, it would be even better to be able to include text with a pin. I've looked at instance maps several times and seen pins with coordinates where the bosses hang out, but no indication as to which bosses those are.

Comment by Nexuapex

on 2009-01-06T10:04:17-06:00

Given that I normally run WoW without a coords add-on, what'd be really nice is a way to enter a pair of coords with the keyboard and have it put a pin on at those coords.

Comment by airtonix

on 2009-01-06T10:34:04-06:00

ITs been about a year now since the mootool library supports drawing vectors with svg from inside javascript.

lines to/from each waypoint

tooltips for each waypoint

glow blobs to show general patrolling area

keyboard entry of x/y

All things i suggest.

Comment by Tasogare

on 2009-01-06T10:48:54-06:00

You know there are addons to do this -in game-, right? Without the irritating alt-tabbing?

Comment by kennybob

on 2009-01-06T11:44:36-06:00

Yes, It helped me find a few hard to find places for "The Explorer" achievement. Which i replaced a few weeks later with "Ambassador".

Comment by justsomedude

on 2009-01-06T15:07:34-06:00

Mankrik's Wife...

Comment by Delecti

on 2009-01-06T15:25:42-06:00

LightHeaded has the ability to link wowhead quest info onto the game map without alt-tabbing. You can add the map dots, and read the wowhead comments for the quest right from the quest log.

Comment by Yizelin

Comment by Fonjask

on 2009-01-06T15:28:56-06:00

It's always very much appreciated when somebody inserts the coordinates in the comments of a quest, making Lightheaded a very, VERY useful addon. (YES, I know there is Questhelper, but it went all spastical on my computer so I killed it.)

Your guide to Hogger actually made Hogger ding! Go to WoW-Europe or WorldOfWarcraft and click on 'WoW Toplists' (under interactive), then go to 'Dangerous Creatures' and search for 'Hogger'. You'll see that Hogger actually had more kills than in the weekends (well, on wow-europe) :D.

Comment by Skosiris

on 2009-01-06T15:52:06-06:00

ITs been about a year now since the mootool library supports drawing vectors with svg from inside javascript.

lines to/from each waypoint

tooltips for each waypoint

glow blobs to show general patrolling area

keyboard entry of x/y

All things i suggest.

Link to a page with a few demos or it didn't happen.

Comment by TegoZanduba

on 2009-01-06T16:12:17-06:00

You've played with the google maps api before? As the previous people suggested, adding more info per pin than just the coordinates would go a long way.

Wouldn't it be neat to interface your guys maps, with google maps and maybe overlay them using http://mapwow.com/ ?

Comment by ArgentSun

on 2009-01-06T17:10:54-06:00

Somehow reading the comments made me suggest something...

Often times quest objectives require the killing of several creatures (or several kinds of creatures), like Loken's Lackeys. It would be extremely helpful if, instead of clicking each one of them and memorizing or writing down his location, one was able to click a nifty button "Map them all!" and have all "mappable" objectives of the quest shown on a map - like that. More or less.

Of course, some quests, like Stemming the Aggressors will be a little more complicated, and maybe even messy - but accurate nonetheless. Additional colouring would also be nice I guess. So if we take Loken's Lackeys for example, Eisenfaust will be a normal pin, Helefnir the Windborn could be a green one (or ones), and Duronn the Runewrought could be blue.

I think this could be implemented for objectives that include the killing of NPCs, looting objects and maybe even looting items from NPCs and/or Objects (the script will have to automatically find the item ID, find the IDs of the NPCs and/or Objects that drop/contain it, and then map them instead of attempting to map the item.)